Just applied the ATI 11.9 driver update, and now KDE plasmid will die within a few seconds of starting, dumping me back to the login (previously it was fine, bar some artefacting now and then). Failsafe mode does work. Since 11.9 was allegedly supposed to fix the Gnome-shell issues, I renabled that... now it doesn't work at all, login, and remain with the login screen background and mouse pointer. Gnome still works in fallback mode...